When you're struggling, what do you say to your team?

Last week we looked at what happens when leaders get stuck in the trap of always being switched on. We covered how you can avoid the negative consequences of this by applying the oscillation principle. This is the idea that high performance does not depend on pushing harder, but on building genuine recovery into the way you work.

But what if it’s too late to oscillate?

What if you have already been pushed too far along the road to burnout, so that you are operating below your best?

How do you handle this? What do you say to your team? What do you say to your boss?

Of course, when you are running on empty, the instinct is often to hide it, to fake being okay and to protect your image as someone who is always capable and composed.

That instinct is completely understandable, but in most cases, it is the wrong thing to do. I’ll explain why below.

But before you click away, thinking: “yawn! here comes another one of those Brenee Brown based leadership articles on the power of vulnerability”, let me tell you straight. That is not what this is all about.

It is mainly about being honest. But it is also about the research that tells us that you can't hide things anyway, and if you try to, it is even more costly to you and your team.

You might think you are containing how you feel, but you are almost certainly not. Not because your team is especially perceptive, but because suppressing emotion is much harder than it feels from the inside.

When we try to hide how we feel, we tend to focus on the most obvious signals such as what we say, how we phrase things, whether we smile. But what we cannot control so well are the subtler signals; micro-expressions, voice quality, posture, tension around the eyes, etc.

Paul Ekman's research on facial expression showed that genuine and masked emotions produce detectably different responses, and that focused observers can identify hidden emotional states with considerable accuracy (Ekman & Friesen, 1974).

Your team are focused on you and so, most likely, is your boss. People who work closely with someone in a position of power over them (i.e. your team) become almost automatically attuned to that person's emotional state.

Research on power dynamics in groups shows that subordinates are significantly more attentive to their manager's emotional cues than managers typically realise (Keltner, Gruenfeld & Anderson, 2003).

The result is that pretending you are okay is rarely convincing. It just creates a different problem. Your team pick up the signal and realise something is wrong. But without any explanation, they fill the gap themselves. They wonder whether the tension is about them, whether something has gone wrong that they have not been told about, whether the team is less secure than they thought.

And this does not have a good outcome. Research by Sy, Côté and Saavedra (2005) found that teams with leaders in negative emotional states showed lower coordination and reduced effort. The problem, therefore is not that your team knows you are struggling. The problem is that they know something is wrong and they cannot place it.

So, when you pretend to be composed, rather than feel composed, you do not protect your team from your state. You just hide the explanation that would help them make sense of it, which only makes things worse.

The second problem with hiding how you feel affects you more directly.

Researchers distinguish between two ways of managing how you present emotions at work (they call this emotional labour). There is ‘surface acting’, which means suppressing or faking your visible expression and there is ‘deep acting’, which involves genuinely working to change how you feel. Surface acting is associated with emotional exhaustion and burnout in a way that deep acting is not (Grandey, 2000; Hochschild, 1983).

So, pretending to be okay further depletes your energy and it does so at the exact moment you have the least energy to spare. Faking it is only going to send you further and faster down the burnout spiral.

None of this means you need to offload your personal struggles onto your team or your boss in a way that is going to your status and damage their confidence in you.

Authentic leadership involves what Avolio and colleagues (2004) call relational transparency. This means presenting your authentic self to others, including sharing your real thoughts and feelings in ways appropriate to the relationship and context. And the evidence shows that this kind of transparency predicts higher follower trust and psychological safety (Walumbwa et al., 2008).

So, being honest is not a soft option. It is a driver of positive team outcomes.

I’ve been in this situation myself and seen it work in practice.

I was diagnosed with cancer in 2024 and, in the immediate aftermath of that diagnosis I was a mess of confusion and fear. I wasn’t in immediate danger, but I was starting down a long road of medical intervention, worry and uncertainty.

To be honest, I’m not sure I could have hidden my feelings if I tried. But I was open and honest with my team and my boss about what was happening to me and, importantly, how I was feeling.

In response, I had nothing but support and a team pulling together hard to make sure our team performance did not suffer. It was a heart-warming and humbling experience.

Later, after I’d had surgery and returned to work, I had a period of depression and exhaustion that was something of a reaction to what I had been through. Again, I explained to my team what was happening and asked them to bear with me. Again, the response was positive, and fortunately, in a few weeks I was much better.

The context is also important here. At around the same time as my health difficulties, the organisation was laying off staff, and people were fearful for their jobs.

Had I not been honest about what I was going through, the discernible changes in my mood and energy could well have been interpreted as relating to the layoffs and so would have had a negative effect on my whole team.  

In practice, how you do this and how much you share will depend on what you’re going through and the people you are talking to. If you have some big worries out of work that are affecting you, you might say more to some people than others. But if you want to keep things neutral for your team you might say something like this:

 "I want to let you know that I've got a lot on at the moment, inside and outside of work and I'm not quite my usual self. I'm working on it. So, please bear with me if I seem a bit distant or less involved than usual, and please understand it has nothing to do with any of you."

The point of this is not demonstrate vulnerability. This is about brief, well-judged acts of honesty that give people the information they need to interpret what they are already observing.

I should acknowledge that a lot of what I am suggesting here pre-supposes that you are in a reasonably psychologically safe workplace. But the sad reality is that not all organisations are the same. That is why I have placed some emphasis on context and judgement.

You should take care to think about the culture where you work and adapt your approach accordingly. This may mean sharing with certain trusted individuals or adapting your message for the context.

When you can adopt an approach of appropriate honesty, it shows your team that:

This is important because many of the people you lead will themselves struggling with things they feel they cannot say. They watch you for evidence of what is permissible.

If you pretend everything is always okay, you teach them that struggle is something to hide. If you are honest, with appropriate boundaries, you teach them that difficulty is part of the work, and that naming it is not weakness.

That, as I often say, is leadership.

References

Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Walumbwa, F. O., Luthans, F., & May, D. R. (2004). Unlocking the mask: A look at the process by which authentic leaders impact follower attitudes and behaviors. The Leadership Quarterly, 15(6), 801–823.

Ekman, P., & Friesen, W. V. (1974). Detecting deception from the body or face. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 29(3), 288–298.

Grandey, A. A. (2000). Emotional regulation in the workplace: A new way to conceptualize emotional labor. Journal of Occupational Health Psychology, 5(1), 95–110.

Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. University of California Press.

Keltner, D., Gruenfeld, D. H., & Anderson, C. (2003). Power, approach, and inhibition. Psychological Review, 110(2), 265–284.

Sy, T., Côté, S., & Saavedra, R. (2005). The contagious leader: Impact of the leader’s mood on the mood of group members, group affective tone, and group processes. Journal of Applied Psychology, 90(2), 295–305.

Walumbwa, F. O., Avolio, B. J., Gardner, W. L., Wernsing, T. S., & Peterson, S. J. (2008). Authentic leadership: Development and validation of a theory-based measure. Journal of Management, 34(1), 89–126.

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